Keyword Discovery is Critical. Data on search terms can be exported from Google AdWords Keyword Tool. The goal is to find the Adsense keywords with the most traffic and least competition to find the combination of traffic, clicks, and Pay Per Click keywords to accomplish. This requires an AdWords account. This gives visibility to keyword discovery from the advertisers perspective.

Add the column on the external keyword tool that shows "Estimated Average CPC" you'll need this to see the high value key words for ad serving.

Export data from Google to Excel

Build Three Extra Columns utilizing the formulas outlined below

Sort the final product in decreasing order based upon the "Success Potential".

* On Average most sites reach a 2% click through rate, thus the 0.02 factor in the formula.
** Estimated Earnings Per Click can be reached by averaging the bid values from AdWords Keywords to which your site will be targeted.

Examples from the analysis above (bearing in mind that all Search Engine Optimization topics are highly competitive. Bear in mind this has been done for this site, which is not the primary revenue stream:

"Blogging" (not shown) - has 550,000 monthly searches. Competition = 10, Relevance to the site (a judgment call on my part) = 2. Although there is mountains of traffic, this still only yields a Success Potential of 1. This makes logical sense, that I would not be able to garner much traffic from the keyword "blogging".

"Get Traffic to Blogger" - has 58 monthly searches, but 0 for competition (virtually none), and is highly relevant to this site. Relevance = 3. This says that (as there is no competition) if natural search engine optimization were done for this site for that particular keyword, it could garner 100% of that traffic over time. With a 2% click through rate, this would get me (at a minimum) of 1 click per month.

With the right ads serving off this site - one click (in the highly competitive SEO field) could produce anywhere from $5-$10 in revenue. As such, between option 1 and option 2, I would be best served to pick #2. To start - any site should be optimized for 1 Keyword.

The picture at right demonstrates the relationship between "Traffic" and "Competition" based on the amount of searches for any keyword for any new site. In this case the example is that there are 6,600 monthly searches for the AdWords Keyword "Get Traffic To Site". This shows the relationship outlined above in the "Traffic Expectation Formula", which can be programmed in excel as "(Total Monthly Searches)/(exp(1)^(competition) x Relevance/3". The excel manipulation is its own challenge, which I'm happy to help with via comments on the site.

With all of this said, our work on Keyword research is still not complete. From the list of keywords that have the highest success potential, we still need to go look at what sites are dominating those keywords. Load the SEO quake toolbar into Firefox. It will show you the PR, backlinks, Alexa ranks, etc, for every site that comes up in the SERP page. If the entire first page on Google and Bing are dominated by PR 7 sites with 250,000 backlinks, we likely need to keep moving down the list until keywords are located that will get you onto page 1. Every blog post, alt tag on pictures, Meta description, and even URL's need to be pointed to those keywords. Remember - traffic attracts traffic. Our goal is to get a start "somewhere" with the end goal of organic search engine traffic, and work our way out from there.

Also, bear in mind, the "competition column" google provides is for "advertisers" who desire to serve ads for a given keyword. We are using it for another purpose - a general indicator of how many other sites with which we will need to compete. Keyword discovery is a time consuming, but necessary study required to make money from blogging or a standard web site.

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Scott! Great post! What valuable information. Out of curiosity would you be willing to post a downloadable excel sheet with the formula outlined in your post? If you have one of course ;) I'm not a math person so it would be very helpful!

The answer to the post above is that the math requires you have the information on total monthly searches and some form of data on competition. Google External Keyword tool is an excellent vehicle to get those answers.

Just few days back I was discussing and now I have a question, Do the competitors click on the google adword campaign to stay in the business?

About the Author

Scott Steiger is an engineer, product line manager, and business unit manager who has built, managed, and runs worldwide advertising campaigns on Google, Yahoo, and Bing, and performed Search Engine Optimization for his employer. He has developed several of his own sites.
He has seen the Online Advertising world from both sides and desires to bring value to both advertisers and publishers through the information offered on this site.